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Aaah! Now making more sense: I've frequented so many dimly-lit, hostile audio forums I've become too thick-skinned and sluggish myself to notice before today that this is a special place you've set up to mock off-brand & expensive things! Got it.

Here we are trying to have a grown-up discussion about computer audio, while rubbing shoulders with topics about James Randi and ghosts (in the machine or otherwise).

Enough said. If the idea of a cheaper Squeezebox that plays all file formats and radio stations at 32/384, with on-board storage, a nice display, wireless, headphone output, remote apps, and universal DAC compatibility ever appeals, they now do these great things called 'netbooks' you might want to check out!

No you are not trying to have an adult discussion about audio. You are trying to sell a line of bullshit and snake oil, and using a rather superciliously faux-adult concern-troll persona to do so.

In all seriousness, James Randi has never gotten involved with real engineering disciplines, only fields full of snake oil. Rather than complaining that he has been involved, you might want to reflect on why this is so. I've never seen him offer a prize for people who can test the speeds of two different cpus, or differentiate between the strength of two bridges.

No, there isn't. All that's on the CD is the data. Getting a perfect rip and storing the bits is trivial these days. This is the crux of the issue.

You seem to be giving credence to the daft TAS claims, and the fact that you're a hifi retailer, particularly one who is apparently an evangelist for computer-based audio, illustrates perfectly what's so annoying about those claims.

There is such a thing as pointless over-engineering. And the hifi industry is full of it. Are you really suggesting that if I wanted to spend ú2000 on an upgrade to my system I would be better off improving my "transport" than looking at my speakers, my room, digital correction systems? I should worry about pico-second jitter, or tiny power supply fluctuations while ignoring the gross distortions in the conversion of electrical energy back into sound waves, and the further distortion of those sound waves between my speakers and my ears?

Seriously, this knee jerk "source first" stuff has to stop.

No dispute: if we say that (very roughly) 50% of what you're listening to is the speaker+room, perhaps 20% is the source. If digital, less than half of that is the transport. So, best case, we're talking about finessing 10% of the performance of a system. So, no, you'd be pretty dumb to spend ú2K on a transport in a system with a ú300 amplifier and ú500 speakers in a badly designed room. That's Squeezebox or netbook territory.

It's plain to see when economic and technical arguments are naively mixed up or deliberately obfuscated - as if every expensive thing is a con.

I'm in the business of sound-per-pound: on a budget, netbook + DAC + small active speakers is the only way to fly. If you've more to spend, Squeezebox + NAS + DAC + what-have-you works too. If you're serious about getting a digital front end to sound really good, in a costly system - like a good turntable or old-school high-end CD player - you inevitably have to deal with the issues I've outlined. Horses for courses.

No, there isn't. All that's on the CD is the data. Getting a perfect rip and storing the bits is trivial these days. This is the crux of the issue.

You seem to be giving credence to the daft TAS claims, and the fact that you're a hifi retailer, particularly one who is apparently an evangelist for computer-based audio, illustrates perfectly what's so annoying about those claims.

I'm refusing to scorn an idea that - granted - initially seems unlikely. I'm not leaping to the knee-jerk conclusion that everyone who says similar things is delusional. I am questioning the credibility of those throwing stones in ignorance. And, yes, we are a bit evangelical about computer audio in the geekiest possible way.

However, given that no-one stands to make a penny from the idea that rips or file formats differ, we can't even impute a commercial motive to the OP, who isn't even getting the right to reply. So that shouldn't annoy you.

Again, separating the technical from the economic, what's annoying is the price, not the claim. If we plug into the Randi debate for a moment, no-one would object to a ú2000 interconnect if it costed ú50 and sounded the same: in fact, we'd congratulate it on being so accomplished - and a bargain, too!

Yes: high end cables cost too much. I've elsewhere argued that it's ethically indefensible for almost any interconnect to cost more than ú500. Yes - some rich people are being overcharged for their toys: heck, there are worse things to complain about. What really rubs on us, I think, is knowing that the highest levels of sound reproduction are only available to the privileged few who can afford them.

No one here has claimed everything expensive is a con. What has been claimed is that asking for lots of money to polish your ones and zeros so they are more shiny is a con.

The cost is the issue that vexes people, though. Obviously transports vary: the Transporter sounded different to any other Logitech device, and the new models will probably sound better than the old ones.

Transports and bitstreams are evidently highly polishable: but the aim is not to polish 'up' the data, additively, but to polish out noise and jitter imperfections.

What a complete load of shit. When you can show a properly blinded and controlled test that shows such effects exist, and/or can come up with any kind of reasonable hypothesis as to what might cause these effects, other than placebo, it might be worth having a discussion. As to adults vs children: some of us here work with this technology everyday in a non audio context, and probably have bit more of an adult perspective on how these things work than you do.

I'd be willing to be that none of the "experts" involved in this testing have tried to control any of this by, for example, moving the files a couple of times, putting them onto partitions with different filesystems, checking before and after defragging, etc. All of this would be necessary for the pseudo-empiricism on display here to be anything more than the sad cargo-cult imitation of the real thing that it so plainly is.

You are essentially demanding that someone _proves_ a negative here, which you are just about smart enough to know isn't possible. But you do seem dim enough to think that is a clever polemical move.

Sigh. You are a troll and pretty clearly a shill as well.

As we have all said, there is no working hypothesis yet. Only anecdotal evidence, subjectively reported. For some reason, this makes you fearful and uncertain and doubtful, and want to hurl rocks.

No-one on this side of the fence is making demands of anyone: especially of proof: it's just interesting stuff to investigate. The more you look into it, the more evidentially based and interesting it becomes. The less one examines it, the simpler it seems and (apparently) the angrier it makes people.

As we have all said, there is no working hypothesis yet. Only anecdotal evidence, subjectively reported. For some reason, this makes you fearful and uncertain and doubtful, and want to hurl rocks.

No-one on this side of the fence is making demands of anyone: especially of proof: it's just interesting stuff to investigate. The more you look into it, the more evidentially based and interesting it becomes. The less one examines it, the simpler it seems and (apparently) the angrier it makes people.

People are angry because non-information is being either cynically or stupidly paraded as some sort of evidence.

1 There absolutely no reason to believe that file location/identity of ripper/whatever affects the sound, on conversion to analog, of 2 identical files
2 there is no evidence they those files do "sound" different. Until such time as there is any evidence it is not an "interesting" topic of conversation any more than is the biochemistry of the unicorn.Anecdotal reports from audiophiles are of zero evidential value. There is no proposition too stupid to be reported by an audiophile

Having read your postings, I have come to the conclusion that they just consist of a loads of words put together more or less randomly. Eg "The more you look into it, the more evidentially based and interesting it becomes"-
This is just drivel. There is nothing interesting about people claiming to hear differences in things which sound the same. It's not the exception it's the rule.

I'm refusing to scorn an idea that - granted - initially seems unlikely. I'm not leaping to the knee-jerk conclusion that everyone who says similar things is delusional. I am questioning the credibility of those throwing stones in ignorance. And, yes, we are a bit evangelical about computer audio in the geekiest possible way.

However, given that no-one stands to make a penny from the idea that rips or file formats differ, we can't even impute a commercial motive to the OP, who isn't even getting the right to reply. So that shouldn't annoy you.

Not only is this delusional, it is dishonest and unethical.

A bit-perfect rip is a bit-perfect rip and that really is all there is to it. There's nothing special about the bits on a music CD compared to those on a computer CD-ROM. They are both simply DATA. Are you trying to claim otherwise? To do so would be to deny that computers work properly and that there might be some variability in the way that CD-Roms are read by by CD-ROM drives. There isn't because - funnily enough - every time you insert a CD-ROM into a computer, it reads exactly the same bit values (or you get a fatal read error if it can't!).

Good heavens, man. What if you download the 16/44.1 files from the Internet (e.g. from Linn, Naim etc)? Are those files different to ones own rips - I'll spare you the trouble... they aren't. Same data. It's just data. Not magic, alchemy, unknown alien technology or random acts of chaos.

This can all be mathematically proven - something which is pretty rare in audio circles.

I'm afraid you're barking up the wrong tree on this.

There are lots of issues to resolve in audio reproduction. Getting the right data simply isn't one of them in the digital streaming model as this is all handled by the computers and - bizarrely - computers are rather good at handling data in reliable, predictable ways. The same comment also applies to networks.

This whole TAS thing is a complete crock from start to finish. They are desperate to convince people that there are black arts to be mastered and (inevitably) expensive solutions to be found, in order to fuel pernicious attempts by snake oil merchants to part fools from their money. Caveat Emptor indeed!.